“How come you have to drive us?” Adam said. “How come I can’t walk to school like Sasha?”
“Because she’s in high school. Go brush your teeth and get ready.”
“No good,” his mother said, shaking her head. “Breakfast important.”
“I don’t want to brush my teeth!” Teo announced.
Julia pulled back her daughter’s chair, lifted the girl out and set her on the floor. “You brush them anyway. Hurry up, you don’t want to be late for school.”
Ten minutes later, both children were in the car, and Julia waved to them as Gregory pulled out of the drive. She turned and walked back into the house, where Gregory’s mother was already clearing the breakfast table and preparing to wash dishes.
Julia picked up her cup and sipped the still-warm coffee, sitting down at the table and glancing through first the Food, then the front-page sections of the Los Angeles Times that they’d received yesterday in the mail. They’d fallen into a pattern: she made breakfast and Gregory’s mother did the dishes afterward. She and her mother-in-law took turns cooking dinner, and Gregory and the kids alternated with the washing. Which meant that she was only really stuck with cleaning the lunch dishes.
It was the one part of their new domestic arrangement that was an improvement on the way things had been before.
From out on the road, there was the sound of a rattly pickup truck passing by. Julia glanced up from her paper and over at her mother-in-law. They were alone, the old woman had just been talking about angels, and this was a perfect opportunity to bring up what she’d been thinking about. She sat there for a moment, finished off her coffee, then took her cup over to the sink. She placed the cup in the sudsy water and cleared her throat. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.
Gregory’s mother looked at her, but did not answer immediately. She rinsed the plate she’d been washing and placed it on the rack. “Why you ask?” she said finally.
This was her chance. She could come clean, tell her mother-in-law what she’d been thinking, what she’d been feeling, but her American attitude was too firmly ingrained for her to drop the facade, and she was disgusted with herself as she said, “I was just curious.”
The old woman nodded, as if this was what she had been expecting. She looked at Julia. “There are things,” she said earnestly. She paused, thought. “Father, before he die, he saw brother George. He die long time ago, when he was ten years old. Poor ragged clothes. Father in bed, and brother George came to the room and he gave Father a key and disappear. Father dying and he told Mother, said, ‘He give me the key, the door’s open. I’m going to die.’ And he did. He said brother George look exactly the same, same ragged clothes. So those things happen.”
Julia felt a chill pass through her, though she could tell that her mother-in-law had meant the tale to be reassuring, not frightening.
Those things happen.
She thought about the uncomfortable darkness of the house and the uneasiness she’d felt here ever since they’d arrived, about the box of dishes that had fallen from a place where it had not been put, in a room that had no one in it.
There was the sudden sound of their van crunching gravel in the driveway, and Julia jumped, startled. Gregory’s mother looked at her, and there was a knowing expression on her face, a look that said she knew what Julia had been thinking and why she had really asked about ghosts.
Julia turned away in embarrassment.
“Hey,” Gregory said, walking into the kitchen and dropping his keys on the counter. “What’re you guys talking about?”
“Ghosts, the afterlife, the usual stuff.” Again, Julia was disgusted to hear the flippant tone of her own voice.
“I tell her about Father. How he see brother George before he die.”
Gregory poured himself the last of the coffee. “What about Aunt Masha’s husband? He died when she was really young, didn’t he?”
A cloud passed over his mother’s face. “That was no good.”
“Still, it happened. Tell Julia. It’s interesting.” He smiled at Julia, and she suddenly hated that smug, superior look on his face, the same exact look she knew was all too often found on her own. For the first time, she saw things from the perspective of their parents, and she thought that Gregory’s mother had been uncommonly patient with them and their intellectually snobbish attitude, far more patient than she herself could ever be.
She gently took her mother-in-law’s arm. “Tell me about it,” she said.
The old woman sighed, nodded. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel, then followed Julia back to the table, where the three of them sat individually, like the points of a triangle, facing each other.
“Masha’s husband, Bill, see, he die. At thirty. She took it too hard. She cried every single day. Was losing her mind, she cry so much. Then she said she hear so much noise from the back room. Always noise. But nobody was there. Then she call Father and say she saw Bill in a black suit. When she told Father, Father said, ‘We have to have prayer’ ”—she clapped her hands together firmly—“ ‘That’s it.’ They have a prayer, and she never saw him, never dream, never notice him again. Gone.”
“He was a ghost?” Julia asked.
“No. No ghost. No such thing as ghost.”
Gregory sipped his coffee. “Father told me, ‘If I can come back and let you know, I will.’ ”
His mother’s expression was determined. “He’s not going to come back.”
“So there are no ghosts?” Julia said. “Dead people can’t come back?”
“Sometimes they come… but in the form of angel. Then you know it’s not a devil.”
“So when dead people come back, those are evil spirits?”
The old woman nodded. “Yes. See, when somebody dying, they always see someone. Like my father see brother George. And when my grandmother’s father dying, he said, ‘There’s your mother, standing by my feet.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Right there.’ ” She leaned forward intently. “He saw. Nobody else saw, but she was there. When you die, somebody’s there with you. You don’t die alone, but other people cannot see it.”
“What if a regular person sees a ghost? What if someone who’s not dying sees a ghost?”
She shook her head. “Ghost is nothing.”
“I thought you said Masha saw her husband dressed in black. Wasn’t that a ghost?”
“No.” She shook her head. “It was evil spirit.” She thought for a moment. “Devil like mean things. He want to disturb her more and more and more, see? That’s why you have to pray. It happen to Sonya, my cousin. She live in San Diego and her mother die. She so close to her mother. She lost husband on account of mother. She take care of her mother, husband took other lady. So after her mother die, she said, ‘My mother came and visit me and she talk to me.’ When she told her father, he said, ‘What you mean, you talk to your mother?’ They have to have prayer, too. See, it wasn’t her mother but the form of her mother. Because she cry too much. You don’t cry. Well, you cry, but not everyday everyday everyday, you know?”
Julia felt chilled. “So when you have too much grief, they come back?”
“Evil come back. That’s why when John die, I pray every single night. It’s hard, but it’s easy. If you say prayer, he not going to come in. When you pray, they don’t like it. The devil will leave.” She leaned back. “Those things happen.”
Those things happen.
Julia was glad that Gregory and his mother were here, that she was not alone in the house.
“Anyway, that’s what I believe. That’s what I think happen.” She gave Julia a meaningful look, then stood and walked back over to the sink. “Dishwater getting cold,” she said.